1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to information handling systems (IHS) and in particular to operating system (OS) activation within information handling systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Operating System Digital Product Key Activation is a process in which an operating system (OS), such as Windows, receives a unique Digital Product Key (DPK). The DPK is a character sequence having a particular length. For example, the DPK is commonly implemented as a sizeable character array. When a system is manufactured, the DPK is injected into the IHS. If the injection is successful, activation (i.e., DPK based activation) is possible at a customer's site. However, there are many failure modes, many of which are very difficult to detect for a number of reasons. It is difficult to detect failure modes since there is no tool to determine the operating system (OS) stock keeping unit (SKU) or product type (e.g., Product 1, Product 2, Product 3, Product 4) for a particular DPK. Furthermore, to enable the DPK activation process, one of a set of default manufacturing keys (i.e., one for each OS SKU) are injected into the OS image, to indicate that the DPK activation process is to be triggered. There are also default manufacturing keys to indicate that the DPK activation process should not be triggered and that a paper certificate of authentication (COA) will be used instead of the DPK process. Since a key is always present in the OS image, the challenge of detecting a missing DPK becomes more difficult. Furthermore, there is no way to directly query a system to determine whether the system will activate when the system reaches the customer, given that part of the process to enable activation doesn't occur until the customer accesses the system.
There is no provided way to query whether the SKU of the DPK matches the SKU of the OS image, or even whether a unique DPK has been successfully injected because a default manufacturing key must always be in the image.